Body Extension: Life Capsule

Intro to Sculpture: Body Extensions

One of my biggest projects of the year, this is my mock-proposal to combat the climate crisis: the Life Capsule

*note that the top portion of the sphere is supposed to be covered with greenhouse plastic as well, but for material transparency constraints & viewing purposes it has been left uncovered for the demonstration.

I thought about the different ways in which we try to be sustainable in our current culture, but I repeatedly come down to the realization that all these tiny band-aids we are trying to put over this gaping wound are far from being a real solution. Commonly accepted methods of environmental "improvements" such as recycling, which takes immense amounts of fossil fuels, certified organic practices, which are becoming more and more commercialized, fuel alternatives that are nearly as environmentally careless as fossil fuels, and green consumerism, which is teaching people that they are helping the environment by buying equally-processed (albeit much more expensive), "healthy" versions of their conventional counterparts. My parody of a solution is this: the climate crisis can never be undone unless we become 100% responsible for everything we consume AND produce, on an individual level.

Where can this type of habitat be found? A man-made example is a terrarium, an enclosed space where live organisms can be contained and sustained, usually in the form of a small-scale ecosystem for the purpose of observation and study.

Going off this idea, I looked not to a pre-human earth but to a pre-industrial earth. Humans used to be responsible for themselves, either consciously or not--but it was because they had to be if they wanted to survive. So reluctantly I concluded that this weighty task must be implemented by formal decree. In order to maintain that each and every human inhabitant of the earth be responsible, I made this mock human-biome "hamster ball" in which you must live in from birth, sustaining yourself only with whatever you can grow on your own body inside your Life Capsule, and composting and regenerating energy from any waste that you produce. I constructed a "sprouting suit", lined with pockets of cheesecloth. These growing pockets can house edible plants such as sprouts, which grow easily and quickly enough to be a substantial diet for an adult human. Sprouts are of the most nutritionally dense foods available, and if everyone was responsible for growing their own, there would be no crisis in food or environmental destruction, and the Earth could regenerate its bounty.

A significant piece of work that I found a strong correlation with this piece was Hugh Pocock's My Food My Poop:

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=30959

The two pieces both take a much closer look at human food consumption and waste production than is conventionally practiced in our society.

In the World

Through analyzing and revisiting past works from this and last semester, I have honed in on 5 common themes that I cannot avoid in my work: Paradox, Critique of Consumerism/Imperialistic Oppression, Human vs. Nature, and Nonconformity

David Lynch: Eraserhead

My recent discovery of David Lynch and his horrific depictions of the human situation have been tantamount to my understanding of my own ideas of societal critique and representation.

 Challenging the abundance of our culture and our irrational societal norms, David Lynch carefully manifests in his films what is to me a quite realistic depiction of human situations through exaggeration and distortion--notably his grotesque alteration of the human form as a newborn. A motif of his is to represent birth or intercourse as a threat to humanity.

Robert Mapplethorpe: Wood on Wood

Mapplethorpe is described as an artist with "no limits" and his work explores controversial grounds. This particular work spoke to the paradoxical nature of many of my own artistic thoughts and ideas.

Barbara Kruger

Using loud appropriation of images collaged with bold text, Barbara Kruger's work is a critique of the downfalls of our society as its finest--paradoxically using the very means by which she accuses in the media. This is the type of expropriation I most respond to and can relate to in my own work.

 Guy Debord: Psychogeographical Map

Edited by the Bauhaus Imaginiste; Published by Kopenhagen, Permild & Rosengreen. One of the great Situationist documents, the Guide deconstructs the beloved Plan de Paris in an attempt to send the reader on a voyage into a world of city of chance, play and rebellion.

LOCOMOTION WITHOUT GOAL:

The de/rive, or drift, is one of the key principles employed by the situationists in their research--research that was motivated by the desire to understand and subvert the ways in which everyday life is conditioned and controlled by the organization of an environment

My Mini Psychogeographical Baltimore Bicycle Tour led me to a conclusion that this city is confused with an identity crisis. It's defined by a boom and bust cycle, by proliferation and degeneration, by urban rot, desertion, reconstruction, and gentrification.

EMAC: printlab assignment, landscape triptych

New to the print lab, I decided to do a little more than just a standard inkjet. What resulted was an infinite scan/print feedback loop, or something. The bottom layer of these images were scans of film photos I took in Carboneras, Mexico, summer 2009. One thing I noticed while staying there and interacting with the kids, the neighborhood, and seeing the schools, was how far detatched their society was from technology, and how tight-knit, quick-minded, and intuitive the people all were.
The top layers are transparency prints of things that I had scanned that were not 2 dimensional, in a failed effort to extract something permanent in a more tangible form than pixels on a screen.